Tag Archives: A Realm Reborn

When I first started playing Final Fantasy XIV in A Realm Reborn’s open beta, I was keen to experience everything the game had to offer as soon as new things became available.

There’s a benefit to this approach, of course: coming into new things “blind” when no-one else knows what to do either allows the community as a whole to work together and figure things out for themselves, developing established strategies that simply become “the way things are done” from thereon.

But this also puts an undue amount of pressure on people, particularly in more “casual-friendly” content such as dungeons, non-Extreme Trials and even 24-player raids to an extent. If you weren’t there on that first day, expect to be admonished if you haven’t read up on an encounter beforehand; expect to be told to “watch a video”; and don’t expect any help. (Sometimes people will pleasantly surprise you, particularly in levelling content, but at level 60, this is unfortunately true for the most part.)

All that said, there is sometimes a benefit to being behind the curve, particularly when we come to the twilight hours of an expansion and await the next full installment in the game’s overarching storyline.

Dun Scaith is a 24-player alliance raid for level 60 characters introduced in The Far Edge of Fate (Part I), patch 3.5 of Final Fantasy XIV.

It is the third and final installment in the series of Mhachi raids that began with The Void Ark and continued through The Weeping City of Mhach. It requires an item level of at least 235 to enter, and the three parties of the alliance are in what has been standard alliance raid configuration since Syrcus Tower in A Realm Reborn: one tank, two healers, five DPS.

The raid drops item level 260 gear (which, at the time of writing, players are limited to acquiring one piece of per week) along with the Paladin glamour weapon Blood Sword, a Wind-Up Scathach minion, a Diabolos Hollow Triple Triad card, and Void Matter, an item needed to craft a few Dun Scaith-related housing items.

Note to visitors: This guide is a little out of date now thanks to a few changes to Dun Scaith, but the strategies for the main bosses still stand.

Final Fantasy XIV’s third major content patch Defenders of Eorzea is here at last, bringing with it some significant new story content, some great new dungeons and a bunch of new game features.

One of the most anticipated new features in Defenders of Eorzea was the new Hunt system, a Final Fantasy XII-inspired activity that tasked players with several things: tracking down daily Marks from among the regular enemies that wander the world; tracking down a single weekly Elite Mark in exchange for significant rewards; and taking on any other Elite Marks you happen to stumble across in your travels.

While a sound idea in principle, so far The Hunt has had a somewhat questionable introduction to the people of Eorzea, even going so far as to make quite a few people disappointed, upset or even angry.

Final Fantasy XIV’s third major content patch, Defenders of Eorzea, is set to launch tomorrow, promising, among other things, an epic battle against iconic recurring Final Fantasy character Ramuh, the continuation of several narrative threads, plus a host of new game systems.

Square Enix has been gradually teasing the various new features over the last few weeks, culminating in the publication of the preliminary patch notes late last week. And while these patch notes don’t tell us absolutely everything about what to expect, they, along with the most recent Letter from the Producer direct from Naoki Yoshida, give us a pleasant preview of what the adventurers of Eorzea will be spending the next three months indulging in.

We took a preliminary look at what was coming in the new patch in the previous installment of Eorzea Diaries; let’s today take a look at some more specific details — plus some interesting tidbits of information that were quietly snuck into the patch notes having not really been mentioned prior to today.

When Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn launched last year, it was promised that the game would enjoy significant new content updates every three months — and it’s a promise that Naoki Yoshida and his team has kept.

Not only that, but between the three-monthly big patches — which tend to advance the game’s main story, introduce new dungeons and endgame encounters as well as numerous other bells and whistles — the FFXIV team has been generous in providing players with a bunch of smaller updates in between times, helping keep the game fresh and interesting as well as improving the general quality of life for everyone playing.

The last of these smaller patches to hit the game introduced a few little tweaks to gameplay as well as the enjoyable but infuriating collectathon that is the Sightseeing Log — a system that finally makes the weather in the game relevant, but which in the process will cause you to curse it on a regular basis — but now, as we approach July, we’re looking forward to the next major content update: patch 2.3, known as Defenders of Eorzea.

And, for a brief, blissful period in World of Warcraft’s early heyday, it was successful. We were all playing together, enjoying ourselves and having a blast. Then the inevitable happened: one of us started playing more than the others, and started steaming ahead. Then another person did the same. Eventually, we were left with something of a split group, unable to practically and productively play together because of our level disparity.

This is a common problem that has plagued MMOs since their inception, and different games have tackled it in different ways. (Some games haven’t tackled it at all, for that matter.) Final Fantasy XIV, for my money, handles it in a fairly elegant manner that helps ensure that all the content in the game remains relevant, regardless of whether you’ve just levelled up enough to try it for the first time, or you’re a level 50, item level 97 veteran who has run it hundreds of times to date.

One of the things that can make or break a massively multiplayer game like Final Fantasy XIV is the community.

You can have all the great content and regular updates in the world, but if your community is largely made up of obnoxious morons, you’ll end up driving away the passionate but thinner-skinned players, leaving behind only the aforementioned obnoxious morons. And thus the problem continues to compound itself.

For the most part, in my experience, anyway, the community of Final Fantasy XIV has been a mostly very helpful and supportive place. And I think it’s important to keep it that way.